A Twist of the Knife

  “I know. Eighteen hours of labor. Blood everywhere. I was there.”

  Her wandering gaze focused on me, and it was suddenly the gaze of the woman I’d always known, in control and kind of hard. “Of course you were there. I get it. You and the other kids always thought I was such a dim bulb. That I didn’t know you were making fun of things I said and did, right in front of me. Well, you know how smart you all are? You don’t think you got that from your father, do you?”

  I wanted to defuse her before one of us said something we’d have to apologize for. I used the response they taught me in anger management counseling that I had momentarily forgotten out at the nurses’ station. “I hear you, Mom,” I said.

  She stared at me for a long time while I waited for her to murmur something agreeable. But she said, “I don’t think you do. You’ve been asking questions lately, so I’ll be honest and tell you a little something. From now on I’d like you to know I’m not a joke.”

  * * *

  At least there was nothing more to be done on Creighton’s behalf. I spent most of the rest of the afternoon in that hospital room, being a good daughter. I watched Dad’s ashen face, remembering how he used to wrestle with the three of us at once. Even with those odds we sort of felt like he was a tame lion and there was the chance of accidentally being killed.

  I tried calling Carlo on the home phone (he refused to get a cell), but he was out. I was glad. Sometimes when you’re depressed the last thing you want to do is spread it around. I left a message saying enough, that Dad was in ICU but stable. I started to mention that I would be attending Creighton’s execution the following night, but couldn’t manage to say it. So I just said don’t worry, and don’t return the call, I’ll be out of touch the next day but will call when I can.

  He tried calling, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I hoped he understood.

  I stayed at Mom’s place again that night, telling her that if Dad stabilized I would be away the next night, but back by the next morning. She was listless, staring at an old Carole Lombard movie on the Turner channel, and didn’t ask what would take me away at night.

  Twenty-seven

  The next day is a blur for its sameness, my recollection dulled along with my senses. I drifted in and out of the hospital room, bringing food that wasn’t eaten, and called Todd to let him know what was going on and that he would have to look out for Dad, and Mom, too, while I was gone. I gave him Mom’s cell phone number, made him promise to call her every hour and stop by the hospital the next day. He promised. I made sure he could contact me if Dad’s condition changed. That done, I decided it would be okay if I was with Laura when Marcus Creighton was executed. It had to be okay.

  Laura and I drove up to Jefferson Penitentiary in the evening. The long summer sun stayed up until after nine, and the only talking we did on the way was Laura on her phone, with Will, with Wally, and steeling herself not to break down when she spoke to Marcus. I heard her say, “No. I know. No, Marcus. No.” When I asked what he said, she tried to tell me, then admitted, “Nothing that made sense.”

  A little later she told me that he had asked Wally for a pen, some paper, and an envelope. He wasn’t allowed to have it, but Wally gave it to him anyway, and kept watch over him so he wouldn’t stab himself with the pen. He reported that Marcus used a hardcover book as a writing surface, and wrote for what seemed to Wally a long time. But Marcus didn’t address the envelope and ask Wally to mail it, as Wally expected him to do. He stared at the letter a long while, then put it down on the bed beside him. Wally took the pen and went away.

  Wally had volunteered to be with him on his last night, and been given permission. They say you can tell the quality of a man by the loyalty of his friends.

  Later when Laura called Wally again, he told her he saw Marcus touching the words in the letter he had written and counting them out loud rather than reading them. “I don’t think he can focus on the meaning of the words, but he doesn’t want to just sit and stare.”

  “I wish I could be there with him,” Laura said.

  * * *

  It was a long drive.

  I talked Laura into stopping at a Waffle House for something to eat. I was the only one to order some eggs and sausages, but even I, inclined to stress eating, had lost my appetite. Laura clutched her coffee mug between her hands, keeping her phone on the table, in easy reach of that improbable call that would say Will had succeeded, that the governor had granted a reprieve, keeping Creighton alive until we could take further action. She had the phone in front of her rather than to the side, so she didn’t even have to move her eyes to look at it.

  “Laura,” I said. “Coleman. It’s eleven. It’s okay to let go.”

  “It’s happened this close before, Brigid. I’ve read about it, not just movie stuff but actual cases where the stay came real close to the execution. There’s a lot of pressure on the governor. He could change his mind.”

  “Coleman. Stop. Did I say it’s late? Everyone but us is sleeping.”

  Mind skipping, losing connection to the thoughts she’d just had, she said, “I talked to him.”

  I didn’t remind her I was there in the car during the call. All that mattered was letting her talk.

  She said, “He was allowed one call, and I was the person he chose to call. I kept offering hope of a last-minute stay, and all he wanted to talk about was what he was eating.”

  I knew why. The last meal was the saving grace of banality in the face of existential terror. To avoid extravagance, the food to prepare the last meal must cost no more than forty dollars and must be purchased locally. “So tell me. What was he eating.”

  Laura scowled at me.

  “Tell me.”

  “Okay, I’ll play your psychological game of Distract Coleman. At Wally’s urging he ordered a Thanksgiving Day kind of dinner, roast turkey and stuffing, cranberry sauce, and sweet potatoes with melted marshmellows. And that green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup. And pumpkin pie. With whipped cream. He didn’t eat it. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Did the green beans have those fried onion things that come in a can?”

  “I don’t know.” She hadn’t bothered to look up while she spoke, continuing to stare at the phone. Without looking at her watch, she said, “I think it’s time to go.”

  Three media vans were already parked outside Jefferson Penitentiary, lights strong enough to light the whole parking lot, their accompanying broadcasters speaking to the cameras pointed in their direction when the cameras weren’t panning around the facility for establishing shots. A larger contingent of people who opposed the death penalty stood silently with lighted candles. From the license plates on some of the cars, you could tell they had come from some states away.

  We went to the same building where we had last seen Marcus. I noticed this time that it had no windows. I don’t have a clear recollection of how, or what happened in between, but then we were standing outside Creighton’s death watch cell in the hall leading to the execution chamber.

  A radio and television were positioned outside the cell bars, a special benefit for those on death watch. It did not appear that Marcus used either of them.

  Two guards in uniform stood near, both male, one of them Wally. “He was a gentleman,” Wally said, already speaking of him in past tense. “Dignified and all. Not like some of the maniacs we have in this place.”

  “Were you able to give him something?” Laura asked.

  “The doc can give out Valium.”

  “Did he?”

  Wally unlocked the door and kindly kept his voice as casual as possible, like he had tickets to a game and they were running only slightly late. “Marcus, time to go.”

  Marcus was already standing, the fingers of his left hand on the wall of the cell as if he was ashamed to be thought unsteady. His face looked like he was drawing up his remaining perseverance from the slippers he’d been given, and it was barely enough. How I admired him in that moment. What
did he feel? I couldn’t imagine.

  Will Hench was already in there, standing by Creighton’s side. He didn’t look like a tough attorney. He looked every bit like a man ashamed of his own failure to do anything good.

  Will was allowed to walk Marcus down the hall. Laura and I followed. Except for the guards and those whose job it was to kill him, and a minister, there was no one else. Wally made the usual announcement, without gusto.

  “Dead man walking.”

  Marcus started to hyperventilate at that, his first reaction to what was about to happen. He was neither noble nor brave nor cursing the world that put him here. He was merely in forward motion. The walk was blessedly short. Will knew to leave Marcus at the threshold of the execution chamber. The chamber was small, and contained only a padded table with straps, and a machine with plungers and lighted buttons against the wall. There the minister blessed him and stepped away. It did not appear that Marcus noticed him. A man in a suit and latex gloves waited by the side of the table.

  I guided Laura into the witness room. Instead of the pews I remembered from Raiford in 1980, there were those metal-legged chairs with vinyl seats and backs, and faux-wood arm rests. The color of the chairs was dark to match the dim lighting. The glassed-in room where the execution would take place was more brightly lit, giving me the sensation of viewing an aquarium.

  “I asked Wally if he had a sedative,” she whispered to Will when she sat down beside him. Right at the end, powerless but still wanting to do something. I could hear them whispering about the hair dryer and the cell phone records and the remains, Laura asking why this and why not that, why he was here instead of in Tallahassee, Will saying they’d done the very best they could and now was the time to stop fighting.

  After a decade and a half of the media forgetting his existence, they were present to cover the end of it. One reporter from each group must represent a news organization that covers the county in which the condemned inmate committed the crime for which he or she is sentenced to death. Twelve reporters maximum are allowed. Two places are always reserved for the Associated Press and United Press International–Radio. Five reporters were ready to tell the world what happened this day. At least two of them had still been in high school when Marcus was convicted, so they’d needed to be briefed before they came.

  There was no family left to mourn him, and no one left to cheer. If Marcus had parents who had somehow survived the tragedy, they had abandoned him. This was often the case with people on death row.

  There was a digital clock on the back wall of the execution chamber. It said 23:56. Four minutes to go. Laura’s eyes were still on her phone, which nestled in her upturned palm, like a small bird she sought to protect.

  An intercom connecting the execution chamber and the viewing room was on. We heard the warden ask if there were any last words.

  Marcus faced us and tried to say something that might have been a thank-you but was interrupted by a coughing fit. He gave it up and just winked, only a muscle twitched in his cheek and made it look like a facial spasm instead.

  Laura’s phone went off.

  The intercom didn’t go both ways, so dying men couldn’t hear any cries or curses as they succumbed. Laura jumped up, grappled with her jacket pocket to retrieve her phone, and answered it. Marcus saw her do that, and saw the look on her face. Courage at an end, he dropped to the floor in a faint. I heard a suppressed shout from the back of the witness room but didn’t bother to turn.

  As the guards stooped to revive Marcus, Laura said, “Hello, hello, hello,” into the phone. Her face paled, and her lips turned white at the edges. “Hello,” she said one more time. Then she turned off the phone. She stayed at the window then. Will had jumped from his chair at the same time Laura had, and stood behind her without touching her.

  I have known many moments of cruelty in my life, the kind where you think the universe has created new and inventive ways to torture a person. But never one more cruel than this.

  The rest happened quickly. There was no drama in the scene, just quick efficiency to shorten the time of any more terror Marcus might experience. The flash of hope followed by hopelessness unnerved him finally, stole all the fortitude he had managed to build up for this event over the preceding days and weeks and months, and sedated or not, his whole body shook as they placed him before the table that stood upright for him. His knees kept buckling, and a garbled mutter came from his mouth that might have been repeated apologies, as if the worst thing about the process was the difficulty he caused his executioners. Embarrassing himself. The shaking made it difficult to strap his legs down, but they finally did and then lowered the table until it was parallel to the floor. They strapped his shuddering arms to pads that extended from the sides of the table, the kind of extension that phlebotomists use when they’re drawing blood.

  Now Marcus was gasping for air. His head strained on his neck, and his torso arched. The guy who was supposed to insert the needle said, “This shouldn’t happen. What’s wrong with him?”

  Wally answered, “He’s having an asthma attack.” Probably against protocol, he rested a hand on Marcus’s shoulder. I think he was trying not to cry. “There you go, buddy, we’re nearly there. For God’s sake, Phil, get on with it, would you?”

  The executioner had his back to us so we couldn’t see when he placed the needle into a vein as quickly as he could and taped it down. But we could see the back of his head as he nodded at Wally and the other guard, posted on either side of the mechanism against the wall.

  Marcus’s chest continued to heave as he struggled to let out the air in his lungs. No one told him again to calm down. They hoped the drugs would take care of that soon enough.

  I sat there watching how quickly the mechanized death went into Marcus Creighton.

  One: sodium thiopental to induce the coma that would end his fear forever. He still tried to force air out of his lungs, but his head was no longer straining, his torso was no longer arching off the table.

  Two: pencunomium bromide to paralyze him, including his diaphragm, which cut off his breathing. His muscles went slack.

  Three: potassium chloride to make his heart quiver to a halt.

  There wasn’t even time for me to flash back to a similar circumstance, those memories that came back for every given instance. Even if the death hadn’t gone so fast I probably wouldn’t have thought of anything. I had witnessed the death of someone who’d committed the crime, but never sat watching a man who I knew was innocent die by someone else’s hand less than fifteen feet away from me, and not done something. Jumped up, beaten my hands against the glass. Rushed into the room and cut down the three men doing the deed. Saved him.

  All I could do was beg that it worked quickly this time.

  From the depression of the plungers to the check for a nonexistent pulse, it took seven minutes for Phil to declare Marcus Creighton deceased.

  Twenty-eight

  It was a textbook killing, no glitches except for Marcus collapsing and his asthma attack. That is to say, nothing that the executioner did was wrong. The drugs worked. All in all it was not a dignified, or meaningful, or high-minded death. It wasn’t the movies with emotion or symbolism or swelling background music; it was mere physiology.

  Will lifted his hands reflexively in her direction, then stopped and whispered, “Laura,” and again, “Laura.” But not loudly enough, because she didn’t turn from the window where she was staring at Marcus Creighton’s body. No matter his motive for entering this field in the first place, no matter whether Will had witnessed his share of executions, like the rest of us he was immobile in the face of grief. He turned to me. “You were right. I shouldn’t have let her become involved,” he said. “She’s not as tough as she’d like you to think.”

  “We’re friends,” I said, not trusting myself to comment. “I got this.”

  “I’m supposed to be back in Tallahassee at a hearing in the morning, but I can stay a while, all right?”

  “I
got this,” I repeated.

  “I’ll be back in just a few days. Let’s stay in communication, all right?” I nodded. Still without trusting himself, without daring to speak to Laura, he said good-bye and left.

  Whether or not she sensed Will’s presence, or absence, and didn’t trust herself with it, Laura turned from the window to face me. She was without any affect at all. “What I just did to him, just there,” she said. She looked at me as if expecting some sort of lashing about how, with the cell phone alarm, she had made Marcus’s final moment even worse than it needed to be.

  “It’s a singular thing, this,” I said. “No matter how strong you are, and no matter what you’ve seen before, you can’t tell how you’ll be.”

  There are a few tells you can’t control no matter how controlled you are. Like dilating pupils, blushing, and trembling. Laura was unable to stop shaking no matter how detached her words when she said, “I’ve never done this before. What happens now?”

  That broke my heart as much as watching an innocent man die. Are you surprised that I put it that way, that my heart was breaking? As if someone had taken it and stuffed it down my windpipe, where it hurt as it beat against the sides. You can never tell about a person. This execution was a singular thing for me, too, and a furious shout stayed packed inside me without hope of release.

  I needed to be the strong one and managed to speak. “Sit down a minute. No, not there.” With a hand that annoyed even me with its slight trembling I gestured her to a chair a distance away from the window where she couldn’t see Marcus. Without appearing to know what I was doing, she obeyed me and sat down.

  I found Wally outside the execution room. He was standing quite still, head bowed and hands folded before him in the stance of prayer, but when he saw me he pretended that he’d been looking for me. “There’s no one else to say. Do you have any stipulations for disposition of the body?” he asked.